VGM (Video Game Music)

Music files take up a lot of space. Originally, if you were a developer and you wanted your video game to have music, you'd have to have someone write it into a tiny little file that told the game console how to make the music. Artists working in this constrained medium, unable to use cheap effects to make their scores stand out, were forced to come up with catchy melodies and truly creative themes.

Some particularly prolific artists produced thousands of short pieces to put into games, and their work is instantly recognizable to anyone who ever played the games. If you've ever played Tetris, Mario, Zelda, or anything else from the 8-bit era, you'd not only notice the tune if you heard it, but you'd be able to name the game it came from.

These days, video game music isn't the same. A publisher can simply drop a few popular mp3's into their game, and they've got a soundtrack that they know will be a hit without having to write anything new. Some games however, such as those in long-running franchises like Mario and Zelda, stay true to their roots and use the original tunes, but reproduce them in revamped, higher-quality files. This way, the themes to the games become very distinct trademarks of the franchises, and the recognizability of the music plays an integral part in sustaining the business.

You might ask, if we don't have the same constraints of space on our video game music today, why should we look back and care about the classics? We're not publishers, so we don't need to care about sustaining their business...

Well, I want to take a look back at classic VGM for the same reasons why those tunes are still recognizable today. They're often fun, always catchy, and will forever be nostalgic, at least for me. Even if you don't think you've played many games, you probably ought to give a listen to The Games We Played for a trip down memory lane, or at least a really interesting piece of music. It's a piano arrangement of the music from many (many many) games, by Torley Wong. Careful though, it's just over 17 minutes long.

Okay, origins and nostalgia are done. Next up, some examples of video game music that are a little less likely to bring back memories, and some VGM that's been given new life through remixes, stadium themes, and heavy metal tributes.

Some songs that make me remember games I played back when I was young (younger) come from the old Descent games from Parallax, and an old Ambrosia Software game called Ares. Descent is so old that the company that made it no longer exists, so there's nobody left to sue for copyright enfringement and you can find that music (The mp3's, not just the midi's) for free. Ares isn't as old, but Ambrosia Software is cool enough to let you have the Ares music anyway.

Descent was released on multiple platforms, and at that time only some supported music in full CD-Audio format. That meant they had to compose creative music, but they also had to get it professionally remixed into full tracks. Here are two songs, one from Descent and one from Descent 2, whose industrial sound worked well with the killing-robots-in-a-mine-in-space theme of the game and has made them stand the test of time for me:
Hydraulic Pressure
Untitled 2

Ares could have had any soundtrack, but the game's author Nathan Lamont decided to create an original soundtrack with an old-school, 8-bit feel to it. You've heard arpeggios, you've heard scales, and you've heard Van Halen, but listen to F.R.E.D.'s Theme (Ares' prologue) and tell me that's not the craziest set of melodies you've ever heard.

Then there are a lot of places to find remixed game music, but the biggest and the best is ocremix.org. Here you'll find songs where the author took a song from a game's soundtrack, and modified it to some degree into something new. One example I'm familiar with is entitled Chekan Winter. It's an epic trance track that builds for a long time, adds a heavy beat, and finally explodes into something entirely different about four minutes in.

Some people, much more devotees of game music than I am, pay homage to the original soundtracks of the games they used to play composing them for guitars and drums. You might call these cover bands, or maybe metal remix bands. Metroid Metal is a project by the band Stemage, [edit: apparently I was wrong about that, see comments] where they've covered the soundtracks to the original Metroid games. The Minibosses are a group who cover the energetic scores to the frenzied sequences in many games, in which you fight so-called minibosses. NPR did a story on them, so for more info and samples just listen to that.

If somehow you've read all that, and you want to hear more VGM, there are a few more things to check out. Check out Lazy Jones on Wikipedia, and scroll to the bottom where you'll find part of the Lazy Jones soundtrack alongside Kernkraft 400, a hit song that borrows its theme from Lazy Jones. The hardcore route is to get the High Voltage SID Collection (and the SID player on the site), which is all the soundtracks to all the Commodore 64 games, ever, plus musical "demos" that show off the artists' musical ability.

Finally, more recently there has been a revival of demos in underground culture. There are competitions for programming teams to fit the best full-3D demo, complete with musical score, into a file that's really tiny, just like in the old days of VGM. For an example of what a demo is, Chaos Theory is a demo made for the competition Assembly 2006. It's very impressive, considering that it's only a 64 kB file.